Leaderboard Zone

Google clearly understands the importance of grokking change. Thursday it launched and “experiment” it calls Google Sitemaps, an XML-based open standard that allows webmasters to inform Google of website changes. Slashdot thread here. Danny on this here.

From its blog post:

We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It’s a beta “ecosystem” that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.

Interesting to note:

This project doesn’t just pertain to Google, either: we’re releasing it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).

That is a pretty rah-rah spin on the news. I’m disappointed. You are usually better than this.

This is another Google-specific format, developed without talking to other search engines or even looking at previous work (extensions for robots.txt or Infoseek sitelist.txt).

For example, the priority element is not described in enough detail to implement. Is it for result ranking, duplicate preference, or crawl order? It does what Google thinks it does, but they didn’t bother to tell anyone else.

This is not an open standard. The sitemap generator is open source, but the standard is clearly owned by Google. It was developed in a closed fashion, and the license restricts deriviative works to use the same license.

Why not build third part Sitemaps Protocol ?I am calling on about this topic recently ,It is a pity no one reply . I had post a thread on Webmasterworld.com (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum31/1904.htm).What do you think about that?
//thanks.